I’ve gotten many advice over the course of my life, but one good one I’d like to share with you today is in the form of a joke. If you’ve heard it, I apologize for dragging it out and butchering it.

An old couple who lives in the City are, well, old. The husband and wife get along for the most part, being married for so long. But as they age they slowly forget more and more. Lately some fights broke out between them only because one would forget something important, like taking the car in for a tune-up or picking up the other at the airport, some such things. After seeing their doctor, they were suppose to heed his advice: start writing important things down! The two of them then got some notepads and began doing it.

So the wife was going to the kitchen one afternoon and the husband asked her to make a sundae for him. “Two scoops of vanilla ice cream, some walnuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles.” “Okay, I got it.” “Are you sure? Don’t you want to write it down”? “I’ll remember,” she said. A while later the wife returns with a plate of scrambled eggs. The husband fusses up, expectedly, and said, “where’s the toast”?

Writing it down is important. I should’ve done that with the couple ideas floating in my head while farming for faction and PvP honor in WoW. Farming is humbling work–it brings some kind of mental clarity in a chaotic and disorganized setting. But you gotta write it down when the Muse beckons.

Aside from lamenting about lost ideas, though, I think it’s a powerful narrative device. There are a few anime based on lost and found memories, and some based on rediscovered manuscripts. The link between the loli-tastic Al Azif from Demonbane and a much more subtle and celestial work like Reki’s recollection from Haibane Renmei is not as tenuous as you’d think, from this perspective.

But when you write it down, and take a hard look at what is presented to you, things look differently. This is partly what has happened with Kanon. And this can happen both within and in the meta. Imagine if Yuuichi kept a journal or something? LOL. The journey we take through this half-year with Kanon, likewise, brings to life what we may merely remember so long ago.

And here I present the biggest understatement of the year.

Kanon isn’t having its first bandwagon with Kanon 2006. This is probably the third time it has happened.

But life with Web 2.0 is different than life without. There’s this Kanon tracker for starters.

I know Mariko Kouda has done several rendition of “Asa, asa da yo~” and I could have swore that I have a clean copy somewhere from back in the days when Kanon was hot stuff, but I can’t find it now. While it’s too bad that I can’t just loop that little clip of moe history on my playlist, I want to check if that clip is the same as the one Kyoani used in their remake. Admittedly by episode two I was weirded out because you could tell the room reverb in the show between when they were talking in the open areas inside school versus inside the classroom or hallways. I suppose some kind of “alarm clock recorder” filter got used there too, but I wanted to check.

So, if you got a copy of that somewhere, help a brother out? You can have this slightly cleaned up “WHAT ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO NAYUKI?!” in exchange.

[update: yay now you can listen how Mariko Kouda gets slower over time: all three in a zip]